New York

With less than six weeks to New York’s mayoral primaries, two candidates have left themselves electorally vulnerable for vastly underestimating the median cost of buying a home or apartment in Brooklyn.“In Brooklyn, huh? I don’t know for sure. I would guess it is around $100,000,” Shaun Donovan, the housing and urban development secretary under Barack Obama and housing commissioner under the former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, told the New York Times.Donovan’s press secretary said later in a statement to the Hill that Donovan “misinterpreted the question and made a mistake”.In the same set of endorsement-seeking interviews, Ray McGuire, a wealthy former Citigroup executive, guessed that the median sales price was “somewhere in the $80,000 to $90,000 range, if not higher”.McGuire later said: “I messed up when accounting for the cost of housing in Brooklyn. I am human.”The tech entrepreneur and 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang guessed correctly, while two other candidates, Maya Wiley and the former NYC financial comptroller Scott Stringer, both guessed over $1m, with Wiley suggesting $1.8m.Brooklyn’s median sales price is $900,000.The housing-cost guesstimate game comes as voters in the city begin to engage with the choice of who will replace Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is stepping down after serving two terms.This week, two of New York’s media outlets offered their endorsements – the New York Times picking the former sanitation department chief Kathryn Garcia, and the New York Post picking the former police officer Eric Adams.Donovan and McGuire’s wild underestimation of housing costs, particularly in a borough where average individual income is about $32,000 and has, in parts, seen an affordable housing crisis develop as a result of rapid gentrification, was widely mocked on social media and by progressives.“How could people running for mayor of the city not know this? Because most people want power, but few want responsibility,” the podcast host Ashley C Ford posted on Twitter.Chi Ossé, a 22-year-old progressive candidate running for city council in the Bed-Stuy section of Brooklyn, told the Guardian that the answers “proved that these wealthy men are out of touch with the majority of the population of New York City”.“This is a city of the working class – tenants, immigrants, people who are in touch with what’s going on. When it comes to leadership, we need people who understand where the majority is coming from.”For many progressives, Dianne Morales, a former executive with Phipps Neighborhood, an affordable housing developer, has emerged as a favorite to replace De Blasio. In her interview with the Times editorial board, Morales came relatively close to guessing correctly.“Oh, my gosh. The median sales price of a home or apartment. I don’t know, half a million.” More

Steinway is a bustling and noisy street in the Queens neighborhood of Astoria. The area locally referred to as “Little Egypt” is brimming with people grocery shopping and bicyclists rushing in and out of shawarma shops to deliver their next order. It’s a north African, south-west Asian neighborhood made up of small businesses like halal butcher shops, hookah lounges and Middle Eastern restaurants.For Rana Abdelhamid, this neighborhood is home. On 14 April, Abdelhamid announced her run against the incumbent Democratic congresswoman Carolyn Maloney to represent New York’s 12th congressional district, a region made up of a significant portion of Manhattan’s East Side, Astoria and north Brooklyn. It ranges from the fantastically wealthy penthouse apartments that line Manhattan’s Central Park to the struggling working-class areas where Abdelhamid grew up.If elected, Abdelhamid would be one of the youngest members to ever serve in Congress and the third Muslim woman ever elected to the House.She has received the endorsement of Justice Democrats, a powerful progressive activist group that was instrumental in the victories of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman in their respective New York primary elections.Just as AOC and Bowman beat long-established Democrats and then rapidly ascended to prominence on left of the party, so Justice Democrats hope Abdelhamid will continue the trend of a leftwing revolution sweeping across New York City that has already had a major impact on national American politics.“My history in this district is rooted in my organizing, in my community, in my spirituality, in my education. I feel really connected. It comes from a place of love. This is why I’m doing it,” she told the Guardian in an interview at an outdoor cafe in Astoria.Abdelhamid is confident she can win too.“[Justice Democrats] know we can win this. It gives me, my team and my community a lot of confidence. It makes me feel like I’m a part of a broader movement – a movement for progressive politics in this country,” she said.In Maloney, Abdelhamid faces a formidable opponent. Maloney, who has been in office since before her opponent was born, is one of the most senior Democrats in the House. The chair of the powerful oversight committee, Maloney has called herself a progressive in the past but Abdelhamid said that couldn’t be farther from the truth.“This is someone who voted yes on the Iraq war. Quite frankly, leadership isn’t just a word. It’s a practice. It’s outcomes. It’s how you’re connected to communities. It’s how people who are represented experience life. If she’s calling herself a progressive, it’s because she understands the tide is turning. People want to elect progressives. She recognizes that,” she said.Twenty twenty-one is shaping up to be a busy year for the 27-year-old political hopeful who began her campaign just one day after the start of Ramadan. On top of hitting the campaign trail and planning a wedding, Abdelhamid is now also fasting. The young candidate has already had to break her fast in the middle of meetings, but she called the chaotic timing of her political debut “actually kind of beautiful”.Abdelhamid’s father ran a highly sought after halal deli, one of the first of its kind in the community. When he couldn’t make the rent to keep the shop open, the business closed and he drove a taxi cab to make ends meet.Born to Egyptian immigrant parents, Abdelhamid grew up in a one-bedroom apartment alongside her three siblings in the 12th district. Now, she’s looking for a chance to represent it.“A lot of working-class immigrants came here in the 80s and early 90s, like my father and my mom. They basically built this neighborhood from scratch. There were no shops like this,” she said, pointing to Duzan, the quick and casual Middle Eastern shawarma restaurant behind her. “There was one Greek pastry shop. There was definitely no mosque. I saw growing up how aunties and uncles built these institutions, built these small businesses with so little. Mothers selling their gold as Egyptian women to be able to fundraise to build these walls.”Steinway is now home to the Al-Iman Mosque, a tall, bright pink center point in the street. The grand building replaced a smaller version nextdoor due to a growing demand for a place of worship for Muslims in the area. For Abdelhamid, it served as a community center where she could make friends and take karate lessons, in which she now has a first-degree black belt.In the years following the attacks of 9/11, she recalled her mosque being surveilled by the FBI and NYPD advertisements for voluntary informants.“Overnight, I was seen as a Muslim. They would make terrorist jokes [at school] and so I felt a deep sense of isolation. People were very scared. They would change their name if they could. For me, this neighborhood was so important because I went to the mosque every single week. It was the only place where I felt not ashamed of my identity as a young girl. Where people said my name right. I felt comfortable in hijab and didn’t feel the need to take it off as soon as I walked down the street,” she said.At a time when Muslim American women were removing their hijabs out of fear of being profiled or harassed, Abdelhamid decided to embrace one. Two years later, she was attacked by a man who tried to rip off her headscarf.“Right after that incident, I just remember not speaking. I remember that because I talk a lot. I didn’t tell my parents for such a long time. My parents were scared and heartbroken but also defiant. That gave me strength. They’re not scared and I shouldn’t be scared either. For a lot of Muslim women post 9/11, it was a reclamation of identity. Definitely early on, when I wore my hijab, it was an act of ‘I‘m not gonna be ashamed. I’m going to be proud. I’m not going to fall to these narratives that are vilifying people that I love the most.’ ”Maloney was criticized for a 2001 stunt in which she donned a burqa on the House floor in an attempt to garner support for the United States invasion of Afghanistan. In her speech, she said: “I salute the Bush administration for balancing war with compassion, for dropping food as well as bombs,” which struck a chord with Abdelhamid who said she feared for her and her mother’s life at the time.“This is someone who wore a burqa on the House floor as a costume. When you look at the time in which she did that, as hijab-wearing women, we were afraid to walk down the street,” Abdelhamid said. “To this day, women who wear hijab, burqa, niqab are criminalized across the world. She was wearing it to justify a narrative that we are oppressed. My activism and organizing started both because of my class identity and because of my ethno-religious identity growing up Muslim in post-9/11 New York. They are both connected to this neighborhood.”At the top of Abdelhamid’s agenda is housing justice. Abdelhamid herself has been priced out of her neighborhood, along with her family, which means she does not live in the district – a fact the New York State Democratic Committee was quick to point out.“Right now, my family and I live a couple of blocks outside of the district. Like many working-class people, you don’t base where you live off district lines, it’s based off of community and where you can afford to live,” she said.A staunch supporter of AOC’s Green New Deal for public housing, Abdelhamid blames gentrification and soaring rent prices for her family’s living situation which forced them to move several times throughout her childhood.“I remember the first time we received an eviction notice. Our landlord sold the business to a developer and just kept increasing the rent. They were really trying to push us out. Oftentimes, it happens when there are massive real estate developers that don’t take into account the cultural needs, the economic needs, the needs of working-class communities, the needs of communities that built neighborhoods,” she said.Ocasio-Cortez and Bowman won their elections while Trump, who served to galvanize progressives, was in office. Asked if she was worried about energizing leftwing support post-Trump, Abdelhamid said: “I’m not concerned. I feel really strongly that we’ll be able to excite young people, people of color, Black folks, working-class people, immigrant communities across this district. Anyone who is really excited about a progressive ideology who wants to see something different is going to rally behind this campaign. People understand that progressive movement and progressive change is a long fight that is not going to happen overnight. The change that we’re seeking is going to require sustained levels of organizing, and this is part of that.” More

When Maya Wiley announced her candidacy for New York major – known as the second hardest job in the US – it seemed like her résumé was tailored to the moment.It was early October last year, and the city was reeling from trauma. In the spring, New York City had been the center of the coronavirus pandemic, the city rife with ambulance sirens and hospitals erecting tents to house patients outside their overflowing doors. In the summer, thousands of New Yorkers flooded the streets to protest against the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless other Black Americans killed at the hands of police officers.Then came Wiley – the daughter of civil rights activists who had spent time organizing residents to hold police accountable through the Citizen Complaint Review Board. A lawyer by trade, she had served as counsel to the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, and led urban policy and social justice at the New School. Like Joe Biden, who would be elected one month after she announced her bid, Wiley’s own history of trauma and loss – watching her father die on a boat ride – informs her ability to connect with aching communities.But in a race full of strong and diverse contenders – from headline-making ex-presidential candidate Andrew Yang to steadfast city official Scott Stringer to progressive Dianne Morales – Wiley is up against stiff competition.This combination of the pandemic and the George Floyd protests has influenced what New Yorkers want to see in their mayor. What part of the multiple crises that we’re facing do you feel the most equipped to tackle?All of it. The reality of the historic crisis that we’re in is that it has laid bare once again – like all our crises that reveal racial inequity – our failure to invest in our people. It is our historic failure to really reckon with an affordability crisis that is pushing out far too many of our people from being able to live decent lives in the city. And Covid, like all crises, was traumatizing.You know, 88% of New Yorkers who have died from Covid are people of color. We are not 80% of the New York City population. The highest rates of unemployment are in the same communities that had the highest rates of death due to Covid. And the highest infection rates, and are the same communities that are overpoliced, and are the same communities that are struggling to get the vaccine.If we want to recover from Covid we have to pay attention to all our people. And what we love about the city and what we have the opportunity to hold on to in the city, is the fact that 800 languages are spoken here, and the fact that 40% of our people were born in another country, and the fact that we have descendants from North American slaves, and the fact that we have people who live in luxury housing and people who live in public housing, and that’s part of what makes us rich.Is there a part of the city that you feel needs the most attention right now?Well, I mean, the truth is, the body of the city has multiple bullet wounds, and in different parts of the body, but it’s the same neighborhoods that are always hard-hit. So it’s the South Bronx, it is south-east Queens, it is central Brooklyn, it is the North Shore of Staten Island, it is northern Manhattan. It is the same places, because it’s where we have failed to invest historically. And frankly, we could have predicted before Covid, if we were to have a pandemic, who would get hit hardest the most.That doesn’t mean we don’t have other parts of the city suffering. I mean, everyone is suffering in some form from the emotional and spiritual exhaustion and trauma that has been Covid – of the struggle to help kids through online learning of, you know, the fear and stress of being fearful about getting the infection. It’s just where is there a cold and where is there a fever?New York has a very long history of white men as mayors despite being a very diverse city. Why do you think this year feels different?Yeah, almost an entire history: 109 men, 108 of them white men. You know, even before 2016 – and before the activism and organizing and the Black Lives Matter movement that started after Trayvon Martin was killed – we were seeing a real attack on Black and Latino voting rights and Asian voting rights in this country. And the affordability crisis has been growing in US cities, and in New York, again, for a very long time. So you get to a crisis point. Then when Donald Trump [comes along] … it creates a new kind of rallying cry, and gets more people engaged in the activism.And some of the changes in local law have helped enable people like me – non-traditional candidates, people who don’t come from a political machine to run for office, because we have a very generous public match program that just went into effect. That’s huge, when you have folks who haven’t built up relationships with wealthy people, in order to pull in those big-dollar donations that it takes to win an election. So I think it’s all those things.In terms of the post-Donald Trump vibe of New York, I think obviously, there was sort of a sigh of relief for a lot of people, but –No, there was dancing in the streets, and I was dancing in the streets with everybody else.I know that some of that civil rights work runs in your blood through, you know, your father and your family. How much of that do you feel yourself reflecting back on?I reflect on it every day. And I always have, not just because I’m running for office. Because, you know, when you’re Black in America, and you come from a civil rights tradition – which really started as abolition of slavery, but certainly was very powerful in the 1950s and 60s. When you sit at the feet of that, and when you stand on those shoulders, you think about the lessons, the strategies, the steps, the lenses, the impacts, what didn’t happen, what gaps, you have to fill, how you create multiracial coalitions, which have always been a critical part of winning change. The lessons are rich and deep. But the biggest lesson of all is you fight, you just fight.New York City has lost tens of thousands of people, and billions in revenue. How do you plan to attract people back to New York?Well, first, let me say that we have to acknowledge and celebrate that most New Yorkers have gone nowhere. We’re still here. My whole family and I were together, we listened to the sirens. Every night and all through the day you know, at 7pm we’re cheering our essential workers. We have a huge wealth of talent, and the commitment of problem solvers – people who stepped up in the crisis, restaurant owners whose restaurants were shuttered, who were feeding people, even when they didn’t know whether they would have a meal. That’s who New Yorkers are.And in terms of bringing more people back, because it’s not just bringing people back, it’s also bringing more people in, right? It is fundamentally about building and investing in what we’ve got, and the people we’ve got. I’m going to spend $10bn, increase our capital construction budget to create 100,000 new jobs for the people who are here right now, who need to work to put food on the table. But it’s not just about creating the jobs. It’s about how we have community care centers, drop-off centers for folks for childcare, we build it. For so many people in New York City, childcare and eldercare is a top-three cost of living. In addition to housing, we’ll build more affordable housing so that people have more options, even if they are on $25,000 a year, not just if they earn $125,000 a year.The other thing I will say is mental health, mental health, mental health. We’ve seen a rise in gun violence and people get worried. We have an opportunity to do the right thing to address gun violence and street homelessness, which will also help bring us back. But that is investing in trauma; informed care for communities that have high rates of gun violence. But also helping people be able to live whole lives, do better in school, stay in school. We have the opportunity, rather than spending $3bn a year on congregate shelters … to actually get them into housing with support services.Part of your plan is redirecting police funds and allowing communities to help create their own tailored violence prevention programs. With the uptick in violence can this happen soon enough?We absolutely can start doing this right now today. I was just going to the store with my friend Nequan McLean today. His nephew was 22 years old, shot and killed in October. And in BedStuy [the Brooklyn neighborhood] we were stopping at all these spots where a kid has been shot or killed. They do not have a violence interruption [group]. There is one nearby, but the boundary of their geographic area ends and leaves this whole swath where there’s all this gun violence. That’s just a money problem.Most of these violence interruption groups understand they have to solve multiple problems. We have folks coming back from prison into communities who’ve engaged in violence, but they get jobs becoming violence interrupters, using their knowledge of the community, their knowledge of the people and the players, their credibility, because they’ve been there. These programs exist in the city, and we talked to these leaders about what would make it more effective. It’s everything from fixing how we pay them, so that they can do the work more effectively. So those things are in place, we just have to expand them.This is another example. We can put social workers in the schools now, we just have to hire them. It’s not that there aren’t any – New York City’s rich with social workers. We just don’t fund social workers in every school. And the services that we need, like trauma-informed care, exist, we have to create partnerships so that the services are delivered in the schools. A lot of this can happen quickly.Some communities, including Black and brown ones, are opposed to the idea of redirecting police funds. How do you respond to that?When people are scared and traumatized, it’s important to listen to them. What they’re saying is “I think there is a role and a need for policing. And we also recognize it is not fair. It’s not right. Because we’re also victimized by it.” And they also want investments in their community.This is a good example: when I was in BedStuy today with Nequan McLean, we stopped at the store where his nephew was killed. In October, there was a police truck out in front of the store [when he was killed]. It’s like, has this solved the problem? And he said, no. Two other people were shot right down the block from the police officers. The presence didn’t solve the problem.We have some of the strongest gun control laws in the country, we have got to keep guns from coming into our city – we need police doing that. But we need violence interruption, we need more jobs and employment opportunities, we need more resources and trauma-informed care to deal with actually the things that are causing the increase in gun violence. But we’ve never become safer because of an increase in police.The delays in the city’s Covid response was partly due to the fractured relationship between our mayor and our governor. Given what’s happening with Governor Cuomo at the moment, how would you manage that relationship?I would manage the relationship with the governor the way I manage all relationships: open communication, starting with principles and purpose that meets the needs of people. We have a shared constituency. There are many partnerships, we need to get what we need from the state government. And if you want partnerships that focus on hard problems and real solutions, then pick a Black woman. Because that’s what we do every single day and in every single way. More